Reggie Watts was at Sundance showing off his first 360-degree video VR experience called Waves, which is a surreal trip into his imagination. It's one of the most quirky and entertaining 360 videos I've sen, and could be described as a dream within...
On my way out to cover the VR at Sundance, I had a chance to try out one of the most advanced Digital Out of Home Entertainment systems today in an industrial park in the middle of Utah. The VOID goes beyond room-scale with their minimum 60'x60'...
Matt Henderson is a visual artist from Portland, OR who has been creating art installations of abstracted Christmas nativity scenes for the past six years. Matt has been inspired to use virtual reality in order to document and preserve his 'NTVTY'...
The Virtual Reality Company is a 360-degree video production studio in Hollywood that has Steven Spielberg as an advisor. I had a chance to catch up with Joshua Watson, Emily Cooper, & Chris Edwards at Oculus Connect 2 to get a sneak peak of some of...
Maureen Fan is the former vice president of gaming at Zynga, but she's always had a passion for animation. Maureen's mind was blown open the first time she experienced VR because she saw that the future of animation was going to be within Virtual...
Specular Theory CMO Ryan Pulliam and founder Morris May talk about some of the 360-degree video experiences that they've produced over the last year including an edgy Sundance film called Perspective: The Party, which tells the story of a sexual...
There are a number of different 3D audio plug-ins available for game engines like Unity, but there have not been any solutions for mixing 3D audio for cinematic VR productions. Two Big Ears just released the 3DCeption Spatial Workstation, which is a...
Timoni West is a principle designer for Unity Labs, and she's working on creating professional tools for creating VR scenes in Unity while being in VR. These tools are still in the prototype phase of development, but it's something that Unity is...
Alex Tenyotkin is a senior design lead at Hulu, and he talks about how virtual reality went from being a passion project to being announced as part of the keynote at Oculus Connect 2. Alex talks about some of the design challenges for designing a VR...
Arthur van Hoff is the CTO of Jaunt, and I had a chance to catch up with him at Oculus Connect 2 to go over some of the most important specifications for their Jaunt ONE 360-degree camera,formerly known as 'Neo.' Arthur talks about how they're using...
Patrick Harris is the lead game designer at Minority Media where they're developing a sci-fi adventure game called Time Machine VR. The premise of Time Machine VR is that humanity is facing a deadly plague from ancient times, and that best way to...
Michael Block of Culture Shock Games talks about his interactive documentary VR game experience called We Are Chicago about gang violence in Chicago's south side. It has a single ending to the story, but there are many different branching actions...
Pollen is a first-person exploration game set in space by Helsinki-based Mindfield Games. I had a chance to catch up with Project Lead Olli Sinerma at PAX Prime to talk about the story behind the game as well as some of the lessons learned from...
John Dewar of Studio Transcendent talks about their prototype VR experience called Rapid Fire: A Brief History of Flight. It's a first-person educational experience where you're standing on a virtual airfield where you see everything from the Wright...
Innerspace VR is made up of a group of people who met in art school, and have been experimenting with VR since 2011. Jason Ochoa was at SVVRCon, and shared a little bit about what types of cinematic VR experiences they're creating.Innerspace VR was...
I had the chance to catch up with Nicole Relyea, the community manager & VR evangelist at Jaunt VR at the Silicon Valley Virtual Reality Conference. Jaunt has produced a number of 360-degree video experiences that they were showing on the Google...
Aaron Lemke of Unello Design talks about his VR development strategy where he's prototyping and quickly iterating and refining a VR experience first for Google Cardboard, then updating it for Gear VR, and then increasing the graphical fidelity to...
Robyn Gray and Michael Murdock talk about the spectrum of experiences that they've created at Otherworld Interactive, which includes horror, music, social, educational, and room-scale.
Ariel Arias has been creating futuristic sci-fi worlds since he was 10 years old. For the past 20 years, he's been writing novels, RPG books, comics, and now he's making video games and virtual reality experiences.The Hum Universe is a first-person...
André Lauzon is a producer at Cirque du Soleil Média and head of their Digital Studio. At SVVRCon, he was giving a preview of an elaborately choreographed 10-minute, 360-degree video called 'INSIDE THE BOX OF KURIOS™ - Cabinet of Curiosities...
Rob Morgan is a game writer, narrative designer and voice director. He got into the realm of writing for VR experiences from his experience at Sony London Studio, and then freelanced with nDreams on their Gear VR game Gunner as well as their...
Patrick O'Luanaigh founded nDreams based out of Farnborough, UK in 2006 originally creating content for the PlayStation Home. After seeing some of the early consumer virtual reality head mounted displays, he quickly pivoted to focusing exclusively...
Alex Chu is an Interaction Designer at Samsung Research America, and he talks about the process and insights that came from designing Milk VR 360-degree video player for the Samsung Gear VR that's powered by Oculus.
Julie Heyde & Mariam Zakarian talk about the process of bringing the stories of Norse mythology to life with their RagnarökVR experience. Julie talks about going from hacking in Unity3d by herself to doing a series of game jams to eventually...
Neville Spiteri is the founder and CEO of WEVR (formerly Wemo Labs). It was originally started to create immersive experiences before the Oculus Rift Kickstarter. They had created an immersive underwater experience called The Blue, and then they...
Ikrima Elhassen of Kite & Lightning talks about the process of developing the INSURGENT: Shatter Reality virtual reality to promote the Lion's Gate film called The Divergent Series: INSURGENT. He talks how the project came about as well as many of...
Elyse Bromser-Kloeden is a 3D environment artist and VR developer who is working on a 360-degree video streaming site called Vrideo. Vrideo is focused on making VR streaming work, and they're doing some special optimizations provide a better quality...
Magic Leap has been relatively quiet about the details of their digital light field technology after raising $542 million from Google, but they're starting to be more public about what they're doing. The most detailed information comes from a hands...
Nick 'RedOfPaw' Pittom talks about the process of translating scenes from Studio Ghibli Films into VR experiences like The Boiler Room scene from Spirited Away and The Bus Stop Scene from My Neighbor TotoroHe makes the observation that translating a...
Jens Christensen is the CEO and co-founder of Jaunt VR, which is a VR startup that has raised over $35 million to develop the toolchain for live-action, 360-degree spherical, 3D video. Jaunt's technology combines 'computational photography...
Danfung Dennis talks about the process of making the first commercially available, 360-degree, fully immersive VR cinematic experience called Zero Point, which was released today on Steam. I see Zero Point as a historic VR experience that will...
Ryan Pulliam is the Chief Marketing Officer of Specular Theory, which is a digital agency focused on creating augmented and virtual reality experiences that was co-founded with Morris May. She talks about how virtual reality is starting to be used...
Michael Licht is a professor of level design at USC's Viterbi School of Engineering and has involved in video games for over 15 years and has an architecture background. He paired up with Nonny de la Pena in creating immersive journalism pieces...
Bryan Carter has been using virtual worlds for education since 1997, and he talks about the lessons learned from his Virtual Harlem project to immerse students into the literature and music from the 1920s. He talks about some of the resistance that...
Max Geiger works at Wemo Lab, which is a content studio in LA that exploring gaming and simulation in VR, but also exploring panoramic VR capture and the software to make that happen. Wemo Lab is located in LA, and they have a number of award...
Aaron Lemke of Unello Design talks about the relaxing VR experiences that he created in order to create a counterpoint to the flood of horror games that were released on Oculus Share. He talks about his first VR experiences that he created including...
OlivierJT talks about his musical maze VR experience called Synthesis Universe. He's been working on the game for over three years now, and the VR portion for over two years. He's collaborating with a musician, and talks about the sound design...
I'm joined by the Kite and Lightning team including co-founders Cory Strassburger & Ikrima Elhassan as well as developer/VFX artist John Dewar.They talk about the creative process behind converting the mini-opera song of Senza Peso into a 2D...
Tony Davidson is the developer of the puzzle-based, adventure game called Ethereon. He talks about the process of creating a world that you can explore and interact with where there are puzzles that are well-integrated into the environment and make...
Blair Renaud is the lead developer for Technolust, which is a cyberpunk VR adventure game. He talks about what it took to make his Kickstarter successful, what motivated him to get into VR development, and how his game development background...
Cosmo Scharf is a film student and co-founder of VRLA. He talks about some of the challenges of VR storytelling and the differences between a free-will VR environment vs. a traditional 2D film. Film has a series of tools to direct attention such as...
This interview with Nonny de la Peña was by far my favorite discussion from the Silicon Valley Virtual Reality Conference & Expo. It's moving to hear about the type of emotional reactions that she's receiving from her human rights-centered...